06-08-2014
• https://firstlook.org, By Glenn Greenwald
Folkenflik's NPR story confirms what has long been clear: The only reason the Times eventually published that article was because one of its reporters, James Risen, had become so frustrated that he wrote a book that was about to break the story, leaving the paper with no choice (Risen's co-reporter, Eric Lichtblau, is quoted this way: "'He had a gun to their head,' Lichtblau told Frontline. 'They are really being forced to reconsider: The paper is going to look pretty bad' if Risen's book disclosed the wiretapping program before the Times").

As Folkenflik notes, this episode was one significant reason Edward Snowden purposely excluded the Times from his massive trove of documents. In an interview with Folkenflik, the paper's new executive editor, Dean Baquet, describes the paper's exclusion from the Snowden story as "really painful."